Thoughts on my Apple Watch

I’ve had my Apple watch for two weeks now and I am starting to like it. For a good week I was saying to people that it’s just ok, but over the last couple of days I’ve been getting more value from it. That said, I’m not at the point where I would recommend it to others.

As a watch it works well. Nine times out of ten the screen comes on when I tilt my wrist, and that’s enough not to be annoying. The battery comfortably lasts a day and might last two given that it usually has 50%+ charge when I go to bed. I have my screen set up as in the picture above and like being regularly reminded about my next meeting.

The bits I like the most though are alerts and the speech recognition.

I have nearly all alerts turned off on my phone and even fewer on my watch, but I’m responding more to the few I do have more now that I can do it quickly from my watch. In practice that’s mostly text messages and on a private social network my friends and family use called Togethera (I’m an investor).

And the speech recognition works amazingly well. When I dictate text messages I take care to speak clearly, but the result is accurate nearly all the time. This is the feature I show people when they ask about the watch and they are always amazed. It is similarly good for maps, but I don’t use it because there’s no Google Maps app yet and Apple Maps doesn’t do it for me.

That said, I stop short of recommending the watch because I’m not sure these benefits are worth the price tag and because it can be very slow, is hard to learn and suffers from lots of bugs. Another negative is that I don’t use many of the apps, in fact I think Togethera might be the only one. I’m sure all of these negatives will be addressed in software upgrades and future hardware releases and I suspect that more and more of us will wear smart watches over time.

However, at this point I’m thinking we will need better hardware before smart watches spawn many startup opportunities.